Jeff Hilson

Jeff Hilson's works include A Grasses Primer (2000), Bird Bird (2007), and In the Assarts (2010). He teaches at Roehampton University, London. With Sean Bonney and David Miller, he co-founded Crossing the Line, a reading series based in London.

THE REALITY STREET BOOK OF SONNETS

(Jeff Hilson ed.)

With no fewer than 84 contributors, this is a truly groundbreaking anthology. There are plenty of modern sonnet anthologies around; but none that have delved so thoroughly into the myriad ways poets have stretched, deconstructed and re-composed the venerable form, including visual and concrete sonnets. We take as our time frame 1945 to the 21st century, with poets ranging from Edwin Denby (b. 1903) to those currently in their twenties. Jeff Hilson, the editor, contributes an introductory essay.

2008, 978-1-874400-39-4, 360pp, price £15 £12.50

STRETCHERS

Sampled in various small press editions over recent years and aired in live performances in London and elsewhere, Jeff Hilson'sStretchers comprise three fast moving sequences of (more or less) 33-line poems. "Each stretcher contains a story, and each story contains other stories." Here the full set is collected at last.

"A stretcher mis-uses that which it stretches into. Reading down the column, which stands immaculate among the ruined vocabularies. The idea of a stretcher works so well that every reading simply multiplies - by dint of new stretcher-ideas - whatever Hilson scraps together. How far can a lie stretch?"Edmund Hardy, Intercapillary Space